


Wind-Tamed

by M00n_Slippers



Series: Flesh And Spirit [2]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Nightwing (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Animal Transformation, But a little bit of porn, Court of Owls, Denial of Feelings, Dick is a Sylph, Elemental Magic, Fae & Fairies, Gay Sex, Harpies, M/M, Or Is he?, Pagan Gods, Slade is a Hexenjäger, allusions to Nightwing's cryptic backstory, mostly plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-09
Updated: 2019-02-09
Packaged: 2019-10-25 00:01:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17714180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/M00n_Slippers/pseuds/M00n_Slippers
Summary: Slade Wilson is a hexenjäger, a wandering mercenary that specializes in disposing of all manner of monsters, bogeys, demons and corrupted spirits. For a price. When his path takes him to the harpy-ravaged town of Blüdhaven, he falls in with Nightwing, a spirit from his past, and Slade is forced to confront his age-old enemy—his own traitorous heart.





	Wind-Tamed

**Author's Note:**

> This is set in the same universe as Blood-Stained and takes place very soon after that story, and the events of it are directly referenced here (albeit briefly, at the end). You could maybe read this before or without reading the other if you wanted to, but I don't see why anyone would. If you like this fic and the concept of it then you're going to like Blood-Stained too. Consider just reading both.
> 
> Hexenjäger translates pretty literally to 'witch hunter' (in German). My interpretation it's not so much that they hunt witches but they are sort-of witches who are also hunters of bad things. They are pretty damn shamelessly rip-offs of Witchers, except with fewer morals. Like, Slade is Geralt, okay? Why has this connection not already been made, like I don't even know. They even look the same, minus eye patch.

Road forks were dangerous, but practicality meant they were everywhere.

There were old wives tales that said if you only took right paths, or held your breath, or put a coin in your shoe then you wouldn't run into trouble, but Slade was reasonably sure this was all bullshit. Truthfully, so long as you didn't get careless and close your eyes for too long, or travel during heavy fog, you weren't likely to end up Under Hill. Still, that didn't mean something wouldn't come out after you.

Either way, when he came upon the familiar fork in the road that split north towards Gotham and south to Blüdhaven, Slade turned his horse southward and didn't look back. Gotham never had any work for a man like him. Sometimes he got it in him to try the place anyway, but not today. He'd take his chances elsewhere.

“Not coming to visit?” a cheerful voice chirped.

There was a fluttering of wings behind him and Slade's horse whickered. The mare flattened her ears as she felt something land on the pack strapped behind her saddle, but didn't startle as most creatures would. She was a hexenjäger's horse. The animal had seen the most hellish monsters this corner of the world had to offer and she'd seen Slade kill them all. Birds catching rides, even supernatural ones, just weren't frightening to the beast anymore and this particular hitchhiker was a known irritant. He could always be found lurking when Slade entered his territory.

Slade pushed out an annoyed breath. “This isn't a social call, Nightwing. I'm looking for work and there's none to be had in Gotham. You can thank your little druid for that.”

“You could come just to see me,” Nightwing suggested with an odd shyness in his voice that sounded almost hopeful.

Now, Slade wasn't the eye-rolling type. He only had one eye to roll after all, that would just look ridiculous. But if Nightwing could have seen it from his roost, Slade may have been tempted to show the being exactly what this sentimentality meant to him. You'd expect anyone who was at least a few hundred years old, as Nightwing seemed to be, to have grown past naivety, but it never proved the case. Between their few meetings—once on a job to kill a troll, another to end a cave serpent, and one rather silly escapade with a crypt-wight when he'd decided to test if Gotham's new druid was any good—Slade couldn't remember what he'd done to give Nightwing the delusion that he was the kind of fool who'd indulge his whims. Slade was honest about the sort of person he was: not cruel, but mostly unfeeling, not prone to attachments. When you were an itinerant murderer of monsters it didn't pay to be anything else.

“What makes you think I would go anywhere, much less twenty miles out of my way, just to see a brat like you?” he asked.

“I'm not saying you would,” Nightwing acknowledged with a pout in his voice. “I'm just saying you _could._ And that I wish you would.”

Slade gave a derisive snort. “Dream on kid. I'm busy.”

Nightwing heaved an exasperated sigh. “Stop calling me 'kid'. I was never really sure how old you were, but I think I can safely state that I haven't been a child since before you were born, Slade,” the spirit complained.

“You whine like a kid, you're a kid,” Slade grunted. And he believed that. But Slade _could_ attest to the adulthood of Nightwing's body and oh what a delightful body it was. The hexenjäger had reason to examine every inch of it intimately on more than one occasion.

Nightwing made an annoyed sound but sulked in relative silence, hopping around and pecking idly like a curious crow at the pack strapped across the horse's rump. Slade heard every shuffle of claws and flit of feather and he had half a mind to slap the spirit off for being a pest. More than half a mind, really, his horse wouldn't put up with this forever and he wasn't in the mood for an unruly mount.

Turning in his saddle to make good on this thought, Slade frowned when his expectations of what he'd see were thrown.

Taking pride of place on his horse's crop was an unnaturally large songbird with a blood-red chest, cocking it's head in distinctly avian curiosity at Slade's blink of surprise.

Slade furrowed his brows. “Since when are you a robin?” he asked, feeling irrationally annoyed at having been caught by surprise. “You're an owl, you've _always_ been an owl.”

The oversized bird flitted up to his shoulder, delicate claws pressing into the leather of his jerkin for balance. “Since I was remade after the corruption,” he heard in his ear. “It's only in the daylight, but I like it. People aren't afraid I'm a bad omen when they see this form. They just smile.”

Slade clenched his jaw, angry for more than one reason that he didn't want to think about. He didn't like to remember that some kid that lived in a hut in the Gotham countryside held the reins to a being as powerful as Nightwing. He also didn't like to remember what sort of activities had taken place between Nightwing and the druid to create that connection.

But worse than that, the idea that something like Nightwing could hide in plain sight as a songbird, if an oddly large specimen of one, frankly unnerved him. If Nightwing hadn't spoken to him first, he would have never been aware of the spirit's presence on the forested road, and Slade didn't like any situation where he was at a disadvantage.

He eyed Nightwing's unexpected day form, with it's crimson breast and black pinions. It was bizarre. Unnatural. Nightwing wasn't a harmless bird, no matter how the spirit tried to portray himself. The owl had at least been a predator, a well-known harbinger of death, but this?

“You're one of the Watchers, kid. You _are_ a bad omen,” Slade reminded the spirit. “This innocent new look of yours is just disingenuous.”

That got a rise out of the spirit. Slade felt the prick of claws tighten on his shoulder through his jerkin and scaled armor underneath. “Not anymore. I don't belong to the Judge, I don't take souls for him. I belong to Tim now,” the spirit said with pride.

“That's the druid's name? Tim?” Slade scoffed. “Not exactly intimidating, is it.”

“He doesn't need to be. I'll protect him,” Nightwing declared.

Slade huffed. What reckless optimism. Sure, Nightwing was powerful, something humans feared and revered, but in the end he was just a small fry compared to the might of a true deity like the Judge of Souls. He was one of the graykin, servants of the Court of Owls—or former servant, in Nightwing's case. Wind spirits that acted as psychopomps, snatching away the souls of the dead from the earth and bringing them to the Court to be judged by their lord, sentenced to either Paradise or the Pit, or maybe somewhere else if the proper rites hadn't been followed at burial.

Slade wasn't sure this Tim even realized what he had in Nightwing, or what he might be positioning himself against in having bound the being. He wasn't just risking his life, he was risking his afterlife.

With a shake of his head, Slade simply stated, “You can't protect anyone, much less your druid. Not from the Judge of Souls.” Nightwing hadn't been able to protect himself the first time, after all, or he would never have been in a position to be sealed. That was just a fact.

Again he felt the claws on his shoulder squeeze at him through the layers of cloth and armor, as if something Slade had said might have actually gotten through his thick head.

But in the end, Nightwing just said, “Hopefully I'll never have to. I'm nothing. He set my punishment and left me to rot in the catacombs. He'll have already forgotten about me.” Which was stupidity itself. As far as strategies went, relying on a god to forget about you was a pretty dumb one in Slade's opinion.

Slade snorted, tone dripping with derision as he said, “Maybe. Not impossible. But I doubt it.” Nightwing was pretty damn unforgettable. Slade had never been able to forget him anyway, no matter how much he tried. And he _had_ tried.

With a sigh Slade flapped a hand at his shoulder by way of a threat. “Now shut up and get off me. I don't need to look like a madman talking to birds when I get to town.”

The spirit just snickered in his ear, leaping off his shoulder in a flurry of black and crimson feathers, and Slade knew he'd be seeing the being again and soon. Nightwing never did seem to know what was good for him and a hexenjäger that killed freaks like him for a living definitely wasn't that.

 

\- - -

 

Blüdhaven was a town where one trade ran supreme: whaling. It sprawled along a bay where boats would drag whales to the shore for the sailors and their wives to butcher, then the young men of the town hauled the massive slabs of fat to rows of outdoor pots where their sisters rendered it down to oil. At the end of it all, the guts were chopped up and scattered over fields of cultivated oysters and used as bait for crabs and lobster. The bones were made into trinkets and the meat was cured with salt out on racks and barrels. The whole place survived off a seemingly endless line of whale carcasses, harpooned without mercy off the coastline, dragged onto the beach and strung up without dignity.

If the whaling ever dried up, the whole town would probably pack up and leave for more fertile waters. Gods knew the people could barely scrape out enough crops to survive in the dirt that was mostly rock and silt without the money from oil to buy more goods from outside.

Slade had found work here in the past. Towns near water always had strange things coming in on the waves or crawling out of the lakes, and the vital importance of their work to the peoples' survival meant that Blüdhaven paid well and called for a hexenjäger's services promptly, because they couldn't afford for anything to interfere with it.

And so it was this day, when he picked out the village alderman by instinct alone, a grizzled old sailor sitting on a crate while overseeing a group of men going about their vital work. They were stringing up a bulbous, grey creature the length of two ships from a tall beam raised for the purpose on a boardwalk just beyond the high tide mark. It was easy to see where the town got it's name as the bay was dyed blood red along the shoreline, the sand broken up with vermillion rivers leaking from slits in what amounted to the creature's throat.

“Are you the alderman?” Slade asked the man, leaning against a barrel that, by the smell, was packed with salt and whale meat, off to be moved to a curing shack as soon as someone could be wrangled to do so.

The man ignored him, drew a pipe from his jacket and searched his pockets for some means to light it. Normally Slade didn't like pipe smoke, it interfered with his heightened olfactory senses, but in Blüdhaven it would almost be a blessing. The place smelled disgusting, like rotting meat and brine, and the air felt sticky and slimy from the simmering vats of fat on the edge of the village, further inland.

With a mumbled incantation, the leaf in the old man's pipe lit with flame, and the alderman's brows raised at attention. After a few puffs, he finally looked up at Slade, taking in his six and a half feet of height, hard muscle, weapons, leather jerkin, scaled armor, gauntlets, riding boots and eye-patch. Clearly he was a dangerous man, not even taking into account his knowledge of charms, and the old sailor reacted to him accordingly.

“Aye. Who wants to know?” the old man asked, eying him with obvious suspicion.

Slade was used to this treatment. “A Hexenjäger,” he said easily. “Just asking if you have any work for a man of my profession.”

The man stared at him a moment and finally answered, “Yer people do have a knack for kenning when ye can wring some gold out of a place, don't ye? Aye, we do have some work for a Hexenjäger. There's a harpy begun roosting on the cliff. Every third day or so she sends a storm of all manner of birds down to attack the village, destroying property and making all manner of mischief. A few times she even came herself. Snatched up one of the village boys two weeks back and dropped him on the rocks from twenty spans up, feasted on his smashed remains. A few days on she took a girl, carted her off to her nest for gods know what.”

A harpy? This sounded like money to his ears. “To transform her, probably,” Slade guessed. “Harpies can't breed, the eggs they lay are rotten. They can only transform human girls by capturing and suckling them.”

The old man made a face halfway between hope and horror. He and the villagers had probably thought she was dead, they hadn't imagined there could be a worse outcome. “So she might still be alive?” the old man asked.

Slade shrugged. He wasn't in the habit of lying to people, even if it would make them feel better, so he just spoke the truth. “Maybe. Or she might have died in the process. Or she might be a harpy, now.”

The alderman stared at him a moment as if trying to find something to make him believe in a happy ending, but when he didn't find it in Slade, he simply nodded. “If ye find she's a harpy or near as much, then just kill her. It's the merciful thing,” the old man said.

Slade gave a curt nod. “Will do. I can take care of your harpy problems. Now, about the payment...”

 

\- - -

 

The alderman offered Slade a room in his home for as long as he needed it to prepare for removing the harpy, and he took it.

During the afternoon he'd interviewed some folk of the town about the location and even had one of the sailors take him down the shore far enough to see the cliff where the harpy had built her nest. One look and he knew he'd need repelling gear, so he managed to scrounge some up in town. Not too difficult, since good rope was one thing you could count on being able to buy in a harbor. The alderman supplied him with a jar of whale oil when he asked for it too. He'd have to burn that nest or there'd be something else roosting there within the month, perhaps even nastier.

After a dinner of tough bread and a salty fish stew that wasn't bad for all that it smelled like the rest of this town did, he'd retired to his room to pack his gear for the next morning. Spyglass, crossbow, his sword and dagger, the whale oil, the ropes and stakes. Soon enough he was ready and there wasn't much left to do but sleep. He'd kicked off his boots and stripped down to a light shirt and undergarments, when he heard something at his window.

The winds around Blüdhaven where strong, especially at night, but the knocking he heard on the shutters of the window wasn't something normally attributable to wind. Upon investigation, he opened the shutter to find a massive owl on the sill, a few pale gray feathers falling from his body as he winged inside without so much as a by-your-leave.

“Get out. I've got a job to do tomorrow,” Slade said, but as serious as his tone was, he didn't expect to be obeyed and didn't particularly mind, either.

“I heard,” Nightwing said, balancing on the post of his bed and settling his feathers. “You're going after the harpy, right?”

“You were watching me?” It wasn't a surprise. Watching was what his kind did.

“From a distance,” the spirit admitted, and stopped on his perch to hop on the bed.

Within the span of a blink the creature was transformed, no signs of metamorphosis, just one instant an owl and the next a gloriously naked man spread provocatively over the sheets of Slade's bed. Unlike others of his kind Slade had come across, Nightwing's skin was sun-kissed and golden, he didn't keep to darkness and shadows, he craved the light, desired the soft and kind ways forbidden to the graykin. It was probably what got him into trouble with his god to begin with. Slade wouldn't be surprised.

Nightwing turned brilliant blue eyes to him and Slade forced himself to breath through the tightening in his throat and the stirring of his loins at the sight of it as the being lazily traced a finger down his hard stomach towards his groin. Slade's gaze strayed to his manhood resting against the spirit's bare thighs and he had to rip his eyes back to Nightwing's face before they betrayed his interest. It was never good to let a spirit know what you wanted. They'd use it against you. Even Nightwing wasn't beyond that.

“If you're here and in this form, then Blüdhaven is within your territory now, isn't it? I even saw the shrine on my way into town. Why haven't you done anything about it yourself?” Slade asked the spirit. “What, the people didn't pray enough? I wouldn't have thought that mattered to a bleeding heart like you.”

“That isn't it. Of course it isn't,” Nightwing responded wearing a frown. He sat up from the bed with a motion as languorous as a panther, the muscles in his stomach and arms rippling and bunching enough to set Slade's mouth watering. “Every creature has a right to live, and as long as that was all she was trying to do then I wouldn't see her harmed. This threatening of humans is new.”

Slade sniffed at that, unimpressed by the argument. It was like Nightwing didn't understand his own kind at all.

“Every monster threatens humans eventually,” Slade told him. “That's the nature of a monster. You should have killed her right when she moved in.”

Nightwing's mouth tightened into a line and his body became taut with the uncomfortable idea of killing another being. For a harbinger of death, a conductor of souls, the spirit was bizarrely against taking life. “I don't believe that,” he said. “Some people would call me a monster just because I'm not human, after all.”

“Sure, but graykin aren't known to devour human flesh.” That Slade knew of, anyway. Though in his experience almost any spirit or thing from Under Hill would eat a human or suck its blood if you dangled the opportunity in front of them. Nightwing might not be any different in that respect for all that he was worshiped as a local deity.

“Neither are harpies,” Nightwing countered.

Slade shrugged. “Not unless they're roosting, apparently.”

“The boy was an accident, it didn't occur to her that a human couldn't survive such a fall when she realized he was the wrong-gendered child,” Nightwing argued. “Whatever the alderman said, she didn't eat him. And I've been trying to convince her to give the girl back.”

Yeah, because kidnappers of any species were known to do that. He couldn't believe Nightwing was actually trying to reason with the damn thing. With Nightwing's power, he could strike the creature down with one well-placed lightning bolt. Talking with something like a harpy was a waste of time.

“I'm guessing it's not working,” Slade sneered and Nightwing's pursed lips in response was all the confirmation he needed to prove himself right on that count.

“She just wants a child,” Nightwing said, his voice cracking with emotion. His stare was fixed on Slade, passionate and pleading. “She just wants something to love. And you want to kill her for that...”

“No, I want to kill her for a bag of gold,” Slade corrected him.

Nightwing winced at his bluntness, as he expected the spirit to. “I won't help you do this,” he reaffirmed in protest.

Slade snorted with derision. “Didn't need your help to begin with. Don't need your permission, either.”

Slade shoved Nightwing's legs off the bed and sat down himself at the head of it, making as if to snuff out the whale oil lamp on the dresser beside him. “If that's all you wanted to say, then leave so I can sleep. And close the window on your way out.”

Nightwing's hand came to rest on Slade's shoulder, and his skin tingled beneath the thin cloth shirt as the spirit gently pressed Slade down into the bed. He climbed over Slade until Nightwing was straddling him. Shadowed by the smaller being's form, lamplight glinting off his skin, Slade's eyes hungrily drank in Nightwing's body, from his powerful shoulders and chest marked with blue pigment, down to his heavy cock hanging between his legs and fattening before Slade's eyes.

Brilliant blue eyes looked down at him through long lashes with something like desperation. “There's really nothing I can do to change your mind?” he asked and it was pretty obvious what he was offering. Luckily for him it was something Slade wanted and something Nightwing had already given him in the past of his own volition.

Slade placed his rough hands on the spirit's hips, thumbs exploring the patch of hair above his groin. The confinement of his undergarments was becoming a nuisance as his dick stiffened with arousal.

The hexenjäger shrugged and laid a kiss edged with teeth on the nearest patch of Nightwing's skin, which happened to be his arm, bent with the weight of holding the spirit above Slade. “You can pay me a bigger bag of gold then the alderman intends to,” he suggested, more as a tease than anything else.

Nightwing wilted above him, expression crushed. “I don't have gold. I just have me.”

Without conscious thought Slade reached to brush a fall of black hair from the spirit's eyes, a part of him he usually ignored clenching in his chest at the sight of Nightwing's dismay. Slade didn't make a habit of giving a damn what people or spirits or even gods thought of him. He killed for one reason and that was money, and he'd only give up a mark for that same reason, but...

Nightwing did something to him. Made him...feel things. Things Slade thought he'd turned his back on a long time ago. There was more than one reason he avoided Gotham. He didn't like to be confronted with the one thing that could sway his resolve against the realities of his job. And what was more, since the spirit had been bound to a young druid, Slade was never really sure he could stop himself from killing the boy if he saw him accepting Nightwing's affections. He was paid to kill monsters, not people. That wasn't something he was prepared to compromise on without better cause than petty jealousy. If you're good at something, don't give it out for free, after all.

But Slade lusted for this being hovering above him in the golden light of lamp flame. Lust and...maybe more. Slade had been a hexenjäger a lot longer than he'd been under this spell of Nightwing's. He was over twice again as old as he looked—it was the nature of the process that made Slade what he was that his aging was stunted and his life prolonged, so long as his skills held up against the creatures trying to end it prematurely. Slade had ample practice ignoring his desires, and even this sylph who tempted him like no being had ever tempted him before shouldn't be able to wrest him from his bloody, solitary path. Slade was a killer of killers. He enjoyed it. Even Nightwing couldn’t change that. Probably.

Slade narrowed his eyes in thought, weighing these points against Nightwing's grief. The scales didn't quite balance out in the way they were supposed to. The way he'd always counted on.

Damn.

He held up a single finger with all reluctance, but to do otherwise was somehow impossible when met with those deep blue eyes looking at him like he held Nightwing's whole world in his hands.

“One chance,” he told the spirit as Nightwing glanced up at him with surprise. “If she gives up the girl and leaves the cliffs, I'll spare her life. If she refuses, she's dead. If the kid is a harpy, she's dead. If the girl was killed, she's dead. Those are my terms.”

Nightwing swallowed and nodded, eyes glassy with grateful tears. “Thank you...Slade, _t_ _hank you..._ ”

Slade pulled the sylph down to him, capturing the spirit's lips hungrily and Nightwing reciprocated with a tenderness he'd come to expect from the being. It was wasted on a rough man like him, but he couldn't say he didn't treasure the soft touch of those lips. There was a lot to be desired about Nightwing, but Slade wasn't entirely sure why the being kept choosing him.

Their exchange of kisses grew more heated and intense and Nightwing's weight shifted above him until the luscious lines of his body were resting against Slade's own. The being was well-muscled and heavy, but it was nothing to Slade, the weight only serving to press the shape of Nightwing's now fully aroused member into the dip of Slade's navel. The thin layer of his under-garments separated their bodies, but he could feel every curve and hardness caught between them.

With a shift of his hips and a deep grunt of effort, Slade's swollen cock rubbed against Nightwing's and his shaft stiffened with almost painful abruptness at every jolt of friction until he ached with the strain rooted in his groin. After a moment, Nightwing picked up the rhythm, rolling his body with gentle thrusts, small noises of sex escaping his open, panting lips.

Slade moved his broad hands from the being’s waist, skating along the ample mounds of flesh, then dug his fingers deep into skin and squeezed the firm cheeks of Nightwing's amazing ass like he'd been longing to all damn day, since he'd heard the spirit's voice on the road to Blüdhaven.

The spirit flinched and let out a gasp at this rough man-handling before all but melting against him like a sleepy kitten. When Slade used the grip to grind Nightwing's erection against his rutting hips from below, the spirit moaned into the crook of his shoulder and Slade's lips stretched into a smirk. He knew just how to break this kid down, to take him apart.

Nose nuzzling against Slade's chest, Nightwing's hands found the edges of the man's shirt and dove beneath, splaying along his abs, sliding against his ribs to play with his nipples. Slade didn't usually have a lot of feeling there, but he was thoroughly sensitized and the gentle kneading made his skin flush hot and tingle under the being's ministrations.

Slade lay a trail of sloppy kisses along Nightwing's naked shoulder before letting his teeth graze the pigmented skin in a brief warning. Then, Slade gathered a mound of flesh in his mouth before biting down hard enough to taste coppery blood on his tongue.

The spirit arched against him in a mixture of pleasure and pain, moaning and clutching at Slade's chest, burying the crescents of his nails into the man's skin.

“ _Slade_ ,” Nightwing breathed with naked desire in his voice. “ _Nng_. Take me. _Please._ ”

Slade worked the hills of Nightwing's ass in his hands, clenching hard enough to bruise, provoking delicious undulations of the spirit's body against him with every squeeze. He rocked his aching cock against Nightwing's as his fingers dipped between Nightwing's cheeks and teased at his puckering hole.

“What about your little druid? Doesn't he take care of you?” Slade asked, and he meant it to come out more teasing but the edge of a growl betrayed his true feelings on the matter.

“He won't,” the spirit revealed, pulling away the collar of Slade's shirt to rub his cheek against the man's chest. His wet lips mouthed at Slade's pectoral, tongue lapping at the nipple as he looked up at Slade with a needy expression that hit him right in his groin and made his cock squeeze out damp precum between their bodies. “He won't, but you will, won't you? _Please?_ ” Nightwing asked, almost pleading.

Gods, Slade was so fucked.

“I'll take care of you, kid,” Slade promised, voice dark with lust. “I'm the only one who can.”

 

\- - -

 

The next day Slade awoke in his bed alone with the memory of his cock buried to the hilt inside Nightwing's tight body as the spirit shuddered beneath him.

He rose and readied his equipment, then took the path out of town towards the sheer cliffs where the harpy made its nest. The road was bordered by sparse grasses and buffeted by a harsh ocean wind that left salt on his skin like a crust. His horse nearly twisted its ankle on the rocks more than once until Slade pounded a stake into a crevasse between two stones and tied off it's lead, making the rest of his way on foot.

As he walked, birds circled overhead. Sea birds with forked tails, small brown sparrows and fat grouses, black crows and sinister vultures and broad-winged eagles all in a spiraling hoard, cawing and chattering and screaming. They dived at him and spat cries like curses. He brushed them away roughly enough to send the birds careening into the ground, not in the mood to be savaged by ordinary wildlife when he had a harpy to contend with.

When he came to the edge of the cliff with the sea roaring far below, Slade checked the security of his pack before pounding in a stake and tossing a rope off the side of the rocks. The wind was so harsh as it raced along the cliff-face that the heavy rope he'd procured was nearly blown back into his face. Slade didn't exactly like to trust his life to a rope and stake of all things, but he'd done it before and knew what he was doing, so he crept over the edge of the rockface and began his descent with only the slightest rolling of his stomach at the sight below.

His thick leather gloves sown with protective scales ensured the tough rope didn't shred his hands as he slid down to the nest. Birds again tried to attack him while he dangled precariously, but shooting a few one-handed with crossbow bolts had the rest backing off warily. It seemed the intelligence the harpy gave the birds it called to its flock also granted some independent thought or selfishness. They probably could have effectively stopped him by attacking in a self-sacrificial cloud, but thankfully they did not and he was able to reach his destination safely.

The harpy had built an expansive eyrie on a shelf just above the spray of the crashing waves. Twisted branches and wiry saplings had been stripped from the barren landscape, tamped down and piled high again. Layers of moss and old grasses were all twined within into a deceptively messy structure that nonetheless felt solid as he touched down onto it. The needle-like bones of fish crunched under his boots, the nest littered with skeletons stripped of their meat and the occasional stray feather and splattering of bird shit from the nests above.

The harpy was nowhere to be seen.

“Damn it,” he cursed. Harpies were diurnal. They hunted in the day and slept at night, but when they were suckling, trying to transform a child, they rarely left at all for the duration. Even with his enhanced senses, the dangerous terrain would be more easily traversed in daylight, and since he'd already known the creature was suckling, he'd wanted to take advantage of that. But for the Harpy to be gone now...

A sharp whimper reached his ears just above the sounds of the ocean waves and Slade's head snapped in it's direction.

Following the curve of the cliff carefully, he made an effort not to look down, even if heights weren't an uncommon danger for him. No point in being stupid, even if he was confident in his balance.

Listening hard, he heard another faint cry pierce through the roar of the water below. Rounding the jut of a damp cliffside rock white with bird droppings, he saw the cry's source, curled within a whorl of twined branches and reeds.

It was the girl the harpy had taken, more or less as she'd been described by the townsfolk. Dark hair, pale skin crusted with salt and grime, features flat, eyes the mono-lid shape of the eastern-folk, many of which had taken residents in that port town. She was on the cusp of womanhood, maybe thirteen years old. Her hair was roughly shorn and her torn and soiled clothes were the same as the boys in the village, as all the children's were because they were all put to work in the town's lone industry. It occurred to him that could be why the harpy was having so much trouble telling the girls and boys apart, on top of not being human herself anymore. She was panting, her skin flushed red, eyes shut tight with pain as she tossed and turned as if in the midst of a feverish nightmare.

He knelt down and tried to be gentle as he rasped, “Girl. Hey.” Slade shook her shoulder, but she only briefly opened glassy, unseeing eyes before they rolled back up into her head. This was not a good sign.

Slade sighed, considering the girl's physical state. On the one hand, she was still human-shaped. On the other, she was clearly deep in the midst of a transformation sickness. A lift of her lip with his gloved thumb showed the gums white and bloodless with dehydration and the teeth narrow and sharp as needles, already inhuman. It was one of the first signs of metamorphosis and all changes were permanent.

“Shit,” Slade cursed. He shook his head and huffed with frustration. He was too late, the transformation had already begun and there was no going back. Now he had to decide what to do with the kid.

Slitting her throat right now, or maybe just rolling her over the side of the cliff would be endlessly easier than the alternative, and you might even call it a mercy. The alderman would understand the loss, as he'd suggested the measure himself. The other option, trying to wake her up, was much riskier and by no means promised success.

The girl wasn't yet at a point that recovery was impossible. It was rare—more commonly the girls interrupted at this stage wasted away on their own, couldn't be broken of the fugue and had to be terminated before they completed the transformation, or ended their lives themselves a few weeks later from madness. But there _were_ a fractional few that managed to become part of society again. Who managed to pick themselves up after a horror like this and go on with their lives with the taint of inhumanity forever within them.

Because those teeth? Whatever was happening to her organs inside her body to make her harpy-like? All the other subtle changes not obvious to the casual beholder at this stage? They would last forever. This girl could never have children, would have difficulty digesting vegetables and dairy, and would crave fish. Closed-in spaces would likely terrify her and she'd forever hear the call of the wind with no way to fly. Her life expectancy could either be shortened from complications within her half-transformed body, or prolonged with the magic that made Harpies live centuries. It was impossible to know until her rate of aging became obvious with the years.

For a few moments Slade weighed the unlikelihood of recovery versus the simplicity of a quick death, when the beat of huge wings heralded something's approach from the sky. For one adrenaline fueled moment he thought it was the harpy—which would have been a nightmare, trapped as he was on the shelf—but the crimson breast and dark wings identified the creature as a robin, even if it was easily double the size one would expect of the species.

When the bird landed in the nest just next to the girl, Slade grunted in acknowledgment of Nightwing's presence.

“Even if you help, I won't give you a cut of the pay,” he said, suddenly resigned to the fact that he would need to make at least a cursory attempt at rescuing the girl or he would piss off a very powerful spirit that he happened to enjoy sleeping with.

“I don't need a cut,” Nightwing replied, hopping onto the girl's arm to examine her closely, his claws lightly pricking her skin. “Is she alright? She looks okay, I think. She's breathing at least.”

Slade shook his head. The fact that a hexenjäger had to school a graykin on the finer points of spirits and monsters was a bit pathetic in his opinion, but then Nightwing's livelihood didn't exactly depend on that knowledge, either. “She's in a transformation fever. Either we wake her now, or she's damned,” he explained briefly. “She'll become a harpy or just never wake up.”

“We have to wake her then,” Nightwing decided, and there came a creak of branches as his form changed instantly to a human body kneeling in the tangle of nesting material.

He had the usual pigmented blue fingers, mask and arm stripes drawn on his gold-tinted skin but wore a stark black tunic and his legs and forearms were wrapped in protective cloth. Honestly it might have been the first time Slade had ever seen the graykin in clothing outside of one instance of actual combat. He was slightly disappointed, but couldn’t fault the spirit for being practical for once in his damned life.

Nightwing laid a gentle, blue-stained hand on the girl's lightly scratched, sun-burned shoulder and gave her a good shake. And then another. And then another, more forcefully, until the girl's eyes cracked open and she groaned listlessly only to shut them again.

Slade watched the spirit shake the girl, pinch her, lightly slap her cheeks, trying anything to rouse her to consciousness but nothing was working. The girl remained unresponsive even as Nightwing pleaded and begged her to wake and reluctantly escalated his efforts into pinches that would bruise, a slap vicious enough to mark, to inflict real pain. Still nothing. With a frustrated scowl, the spirit turned to Slade, who'd done nothing but stand and watch his efforts, and demanded, “Help me!”

“I don't know what you expect me to do that you aren't already doing,” Slade told him.

Nightwing released a gusty sigh, conceding the point. “She's not responding to touch or sound. Maybe heat? Cold? Light?”

“If she was going to wake up, she'd have already done it by now,” Slade said, but the spirit ignored him and laid a hand along the girl's neck, frost forming against her skin at the touch. She flinched by didn't even open her eyes.

Nightwing turned to him and snapped, “Fire! Try burning her.”

Slade groaned, fed up with the spirit's stubbornness. “Nightwing...” he complained.

Nightwing ignored him and broke off a stick from one of the large branches under their feet. Holding it out toward Slade, he demanded, “Light this with one of your charms. Fire isn't my element, the closest I can do is lightning.”

“No. If she was going to wake up she would have by now,” Slade called over the wind. “Just let her go.”

The energy bled from Nightwing's body, his gaze sad as it drifting to the girl, panting on his lap. He smoothed back a lock of her dark hair, a match to his own, and a decision seemed to solidify behind his eyes. “If we can't wake her,” Nightwing said solemnly, “then we'll just have to let her become a harpy.”

Slade's brows snapped together in outrage at the utter ridiculousness of what he was hearing from the being. “ _Are you serious?_ ” Slade spat with mild disbelief. “No. If we can't wake her up, then I kill her. That was the deal.”

Nightwing rounded on him, his bright eyes flashing with fervor as he shouted back.“She hasn't done anything wrong, you can't just _kill_ her!” Nightwing argued and not for the first time Slade marveled that any being as old as Nightwing was could be so damn naïve.

“I don't need to see her do anything wrong to know that if she becomes a harpy, eventually she will,” Slade explained and spread a hand to indicate the eyrie they were standing on. “It's in their nature. One day she'll feel compelled to nest and there will be another town with another girl snatched from her home and forced into a transformation. If she won't wake up, then it's obvious that she has to die now.”

Nightwing shot to his feet, tramping barefoot over the moss and needle-fine fish bones up to Slade. The spirit squared his shoulders against the hexenjäger, not even seeming to notice how much Slade dwarfed him as he shouted his feelings to the man.

“You can't judge anyone based on actions they haven't taken yet!” Nightwing shook his head angrily, clenching his hands into fists. “It isn't fair! It isn't right!”

As beautiful as Nightwing was, his eyes dark with righteous fury, that wonderful body of his taut with anger, Slade hated this. Hated seeing the spirit set against him, hated seeing him in pain with the thought of the girl's death on his conscience. He didn't want to admit it, even to himself, but Slade would spare him this if he could.

But he couldn’t. This was the harsh reality.

“That's just the thing,” Slade said, his voice ice cold. He stepped forward to back Nightwing towards the girl's prone form and the spirit took a single hesitant step back but kept his glare firmly on Slade even as the man invaded his space.

“I _don't_ care about what's right or fair,” he finished with a snarl. “I'm being paid to kill the monsters molesting this town, and if she becomes a harpy, she falls under that contract. It's as simple as that.”

Slade stepped around Nightwing, brushing against the damp rock of the cliff-face, and knelt in the nest next to the girl. From his boot, he pulled a wickedly sharp knife and told Nightwing with all seriousness, “And anyone who gets in my way? They die, too.”

Nightwing's muscles relaxed into a ready stance as he ducked his head, eying Slade with wariness. “You can't kill a servant of the Judge,” the being warned him, but his posture said otherwise. “You can't kill a Talon of the Court of Owls. Death can't touch my kind.”

Slade sneered and spun the knife in his hand, leveling the point at Nightwing. “So quickly you forget, even though you strut around with the blood-red chest of a robin—you're not a Talon anymore, Nightwing. You pissed off your god by being too damn soft and he threw you away for a little druid to pick up. You don't have the Judge's protection. Iron will kill you as quickly as anything from Under Hill and I'm packing a _hell_ of a lot of iron.”

Nightwing's jaw tightened, his eyes glanced down to glare at the steel knife in his hand and then back up to Slade's face. “You'd really try to kill me, Slade? Just for getting in your way?”

“Killing things like you is what I do, kid. I certainly never claimed otherwise, that's your own delusion.”

“You're as bad as the Judge,” Nightwing accused with a furious hiss.

Slade snorted, indignant with the comparison. “No. I'm not arrogant enough to think I can sort the souls of humanity. I don't cast judgments on anyone. I've just got a job to do, and you're interfering with that job. I've never backed down from a mark and I'll be damned if I let one go now...even for you.”

Nightwing shook his head with frustration. “She's just a child. You're not unfeeling, Slade. I know it, even if you pretend otherwise, so why won't you bend on this?”

He shrugged. “Occupational integrity, I guess. Or maybe I've just been burned too many times not to see where that path leads.”

“You can take her to town,” Nightwing tried to bargain. “Give her more time to wake up. Just a little more time.”

“No. It has to be now.” The townspeople would be too soft. They wouldn't want to kill her until there was already another full-blown harpy to contend with and he had no interest in hanging around a town that smelled like rotting fish longer than he had to.

“You really won't change your mind?” He could see the hesitation, the distress in Nightwing's face. Slade didn't care about the girl or her family. Not really. But if he could use them to convince Nightwing to let him do his job than he'd argue the humanity of his actions all damn day.

“This is how it has to be, Nightwing,” Slade explained. “If she was going to wake up, she would have already from what you've done. And if she somehow woke later, she'd just die from insanity or organ failure. I've seen it. And no one wants to be turned into a harpy—into a monster. This is for the best. It's what she would want. It's what her family would want.”

He'd hoped that appealing to the kid's emotions would sway him, but even the mention of the child's family, the suggestion it was a mercy killing—which in Slade's eyes it was, even if mercy wasn't his primary motivation—didn't seem to dent his foolish shield of pacifism.

Nightwing opened his mouth, to continue the argument no doubt, but a piercing scream somewhere between a falcon's cry and a woman's shriek shattered through the air.

Slade reacted instinctively to cover his ears at the intrusive sound, loud enough and sharp enough to paralyze him from making any motions and interfered with his train of thought. Beside him, Nightwing had also staggered to the ground, hands on his head against the sonic disturbance.

Abruptly, a burst of wind howled and slammed into Slade with the force of something solid and he was thrown into the slick rocks of the cliff alongside Nightwing. Slade's head was slammed into the cliff, opening up a cut above his good eye that started to bleed immediately. His ears rang from the blow and the deafening shriek, and his vision swam as he fell on both knees into the pile of branches and reeds. The nest debris had been picked up and scattered by the force of the gale and he felt the sting of more minor cuts where the sharp fish bones and sticks had been flung airborne and sliced at his exposed skin.

A normal man might be dead from the head blow alone, but Slade was only staggered. He was tougher than an ordinary human and back on his feet almost instantly, searching for his attacker. He wasn't going to die on a fucking ledge in the middle of nowhere. This bird was dead the moment she'd come under Deathstroke's sights.

“Shit,” Slade cursed as he recovered from the blow, drawing his crossbow from his back and aiming into the sky, keen eyes searching for his quarry. The combination of swirling clouds of birds and his unsteady vision made it hard to pick out the harpy, even as comparatively big and human-featured as it was. But finally it pulled away from it's flock, diving for the eyrie like a stooping falcon until it grew bigger and bigger, closing the distance fast. Reckless idiot.

Slade had killed harpies before. This was the perfect time, when they were stupid and angry and acting on animal instincts, trapped in an angry stoop, unable to maneuver out of the way of a bolt or send a gale of wind to chop it from the air. You could shoot them in the head, or even just the shoulder or wing and they'd do all the work themselves, breaking their own fool necks when they couldn't pull out of the dive and crashed into the ground. Slade felt a heady uptick in his adrenaline as he raised the crossbow, world narrowing to a point before him, ready to kill as he had so very many times before.

Until _a certain fucking spirit_ moved to stand in his way with a pretty glare.

“ _Damn it,_ Nightwing!” Slade shouted and clamped a hand on the spirit's shoulder ready to shove him off the fucking cliff if it would get the being out of his way. He was a wind spirit after all, he wouldn't even fall.

“Just wait!” Nightwing said, wrapping his own blue-tinged fingers around the wrist of the Slade's hand on his shoulder. Slade was certain his one eye was glaring at the being like he was a maniac, but Nightwing just squeezed gently at his wrist like a prayer, as if he hadn't even seen it. And gods help Slade, but he lowered the crossbow without even thinking about it and Nightwing's face lit up like the sun with appreciation. What was this spirit _doing_ to him? Was he really going to give up this chance so the moron could play peacemaker?

Apparently he was.

Whatever. Any signs of the situation going south and he'd shoot the bird in the back if he had to. One way or another Slade was killing that harpy today and Nightwing was already going to hate him for it, doing it with a cheap shot wasn't going to make any difference.

The graykin turned to the harpy as she barreled through the sky toward them with a scream that rent air and had Slade wincing at the abuse to his ears. “Bea! Beatrice! It's me, Nightwing!” the spirit called up at the creature. “I'm not here to hurt you, either of you!”

To Slade's astonishment, the harpy pulled back it's stoop, throwing out wings to break its dive. The wind churned up from it's heavy wing beats scattered any remaining nest debris with a musical clatter as the detritus tumbled over the cliff and against the tangle of branches.

As the creature spiraled through the air, falling closer, most of the sky above them was obscured from view, the entire eyrie shadowed by the harpy's massive white wings, barred in gray and speckled in black, the dark tips of the long, narrow flight feathers glinting with a rainbow of iridescence. At the center of those wings was the bust and breast of a small woman with strangely delicate features attached to an elongated eagle's body with talons the size of daggers. She had a heart-shaped face, pointed chin, mousy brown, curly hair cut raggedly at the shoulders and piercing, angry gray-blue eyes. When she opened her mouth, the teeth were needle-sharp and inhuman.

Slade kept his eye on the monster and she in turn glared at him as she touched down onto the eyrie with an angry shriek, her powerful eagle-legs performing an avian-like balancing motion as she folded her curtain of wings under her arms and stalked towards Nightwing, picking her way clumsily over the branches of the nest. The creature barely came up to Nightwing's shoulder when it stood like this, but the size of it's wings unfurled had seemed as if they could overshadow the whole world.

“ _You!_ You you you _you_! Get back! Get away! She's mine!” the harpy spat. Her voice had a hollow quality like a woodwind flute, and the sounds of the words were malformed and oddly-shaped as if she was having trouble remembering how human language worked. “She's my child! Mine!”

“I know you love her, but she's not your child,” Nightwing said, not unkindly as he stepped up to the harpy, blocking her from strutting past him to the girl at the edge of the eyrie. Said girl hadn't even reacted to the paralyzing scream and was still slumbering fitfully, her arms littered with scratches from the flying debris churned up by the wind-based attack. That all but proved to Slade that she was a goner.

“Remember, Beatrice, you used to be human too,” Nightwing pleaded with a stress-furrow between his dark brows. He reached out his hands to lay on the harpy's feathered shoulders and the creature stared at the point where one hand touched her, as if considering biting it off.

“Remember how you felt when you were taken away?” Nightwing went on with a gentle shake to pry the harpy's attention back to face. “Weren't you scared and frightened? You know she has a family that cares about her too, that misses her. You have to let her go _home_ , Beatrice.”

The harpy blinked up at Nightwing suddenly. “ _Home,_ ” she repeated the word, her eyes for a moment, glassy and far off, and yet more human than they had been in the moments previously when she'd been focused on her surroundings.

She flinched and shook her head violently. “No, no home for Beatrice. No longer,” the harpy said. Then she spread her wings swiftly enough to send Nightwing hurriedly backing away to avoid being flung into the cliff. The shadow of her massive wings rose threateningly over them and Slade cursed and wiped blood from his eye to prepare a defense.

“There is no Beatrice— _there is only Pigeon,_ ” the harpy shrieked.

She slashed at Nightwing with a claw as she took back to the air, and Nightwing finally came to his senses enough to send out a wave of air to push the harpy away and keep the thing from slicing his arm off.

Slade raised his crossbow and took the shot before Nightwing could get in his way and a bolt-bloomed from one eye as the harpy crashed in a heap of feathers into the eyrie with a bloodcurdling scream and a spray of crimson gore against the white-limed cliff.

The cloud of birds around them screamed and descended upon the eyrie like angry hornets. Slade had to raise his arm to protect his face from beaks and claws as Nightwing finally did something useful and sent another gust of air to scatter their enemies.

“ _No! Mine! Mine! Mine! Die! Die!_ ” The harpy was still alive, screaming, thrashing, destroying her own nest in anger and panic. There was a rumble and creak as huge logs and branches were kicked and flung by her powerful wings over the side of the cliff, where they clattered against the rocks and crashed into the waves below only for the sea to toss them back at the cliff.

Slade set another bolt in the crossbow and aimed into the writhing mass of blood and feathers that at any moment was going to send the whole eyrie plummeting into the waves if he didn't do something soon.

“Slade, no!” Nightwing decried, but it was a token protest, as he didn't do much more than raise a hand as Slade loosed the arrow that stuck in the creature's chest and finally stopped it's shrieks. The thing kept moving, as if possessed, but for all intents and purposes it was dead. It was just a disturbing habit of harpies that they kept trying to claw their way through whatever was in front of them until they were burned to dust.

Which was the next task before him.

“Get out of here,” Slade ordered as he stowed his crossbow and found the flask of whale oil he'd brought for the job, liberally flinging it over the harpy's still violently jerking body.

“The girl—,” Nightwing began, but Slade just wasn't in the mood.

“If you want to save her, then figure out a way yourself, I'm not hauling deadweight back up that rope.”

Nightwing look annoyed but didn't argue. The being looked pathetic and miserable, covered in scratches, shoulders drooping in defeat. He only stepped around Slade to take the girl up in his arms before a breeze whipped around the nest, loud in Slade's ears and carried the graykin and his charge into the sky, as if suddenly weightless. Slade had to tamp down an involuntary feeling of wonder at Nightwing's power and beauty when he was controlling the winds. If the damned spirit had been less of a pussy little bitch this would all have been over quickly.

Gods this job had been such a shit show.

Slade finished dousing the nest with the oil to make certain everything would burn, carefully avoiding the still rampaging body of the harpy, burbling blood from it's dual wounds. He climbed partway up the rope then called out the words for his fire charm and the oil caught and lit up the eyrie like kindling. He took the rope as quickly as he could to avoid the growing flames and the end of the rope, which would inevitably catch too, eventually.

Below him the flames grew bigger, and hotter, all the birds making their nests above the eyrie abandoning the cliff and cawing angrily at the flames and black cloud reaching into the sky. The fire crawled over the harpy's feathered body and enveloped it like a pyre, rather than something that had been alive only moments before. It was unnatural, how well it burned, as well as how the instant the flames touched the tips of the feathers the creature lay suddenly still, the monster within quelled.

When Slade reached the top of the rocks, he found Nightwing waiting at the edge and looking down at the fire storm below with his jaw clenched tight, his eyes red-rimmed from smoke or maybe unshed tears. His face flickered gold from the light of the flames as gray smoke rose in the air around him and the wind whipped at his ink black hair.

“I think she remembered, for a moment there,” Nightwing said hollowly, as Slade pulled the stake anchoring his rope to the cliff rocks and flung what was left of it down into the blaze. “Remembered her humanity.”

“Maybe,” Slade acknowledged with a tired huff.

“I've never been human,” Nightwing pointed out.

It might have seemed like a _non sequiter_ but suddenly it all made a bit more sense to Slade why the being had been fighting so damned hard for the foul creature's redemption.

If inhumanity made one a monster, then Nightwing was a monster, and for one reason or another that was something the being wanted so badly not to be. He'd been born graykin, destined to serve the Judge of Souls, to shepherd the dead to be counted like cattle and traded like currency between uncaring gods. But something in him hadn't been satisfied with that cold existence. It was why he'd been damned, and it was why he was here now. Why Slade could know him at all, could experience the unexpected beauty and warmth of him.

Slade sighed and wiped away more blood from his eye. Nightwing deserved better than someone like Slade. Maybe someone like that druid of his, with kind words and gentle hands. Someone who could put his fears to rest with compassion. All Slade could do was shake his head at the billowing smoke and say, “Humanity isn't all it's cracked up to be. Neither are monsters. The only difference is how many teeth they have.”

Nightwing nodded absently. He seemed to recognize Slade's words for the poor attempt at comfort they were. After another moment to stare at the funereal pyre Slade had made of the harpy's eyrie, he just sighed and turned away from the cliff face to their other problem, lying on the ground a few spans back from the edge of the rocks.

There lay the girl in bad shape. She was perspiring and panting, her skin flush with fever. At this rate Slade wasn't even sure she'd survive to become a harpy. She'd probably die mid-transformation on her own. It wasn't uncommon.

Nightwing walked over and knelt by her side, smoothing her hair from her face with heartfelt tenderness. Slade looked down at them both, weighing his chances against Nightwing if the idiot really wouldn't back down and let Slade kill her.

From his tunic, Nightwing pulled out what looked to be the same stick he'd taken from the nest below earlier and turned to Slade, desperation in his eyes, “One last try? Please?”

Slade glanced briefly at the stick before meeting Nightwing's gaze, which was probably where he went wrong. It was on his tongue to say _no_. To say the girl had been through enough and it was time to end her suffering, or maybe time to end Slade's suffering, from putting up with this whole mess.

But somehow he couldn't say no, not to that look of quiet pleading in his eyes. Slade spoke the words of his fire charm and the end of the stick fizzled and lit with flame.

Nightwing smiled weakly at him and pulled the girl into his lap and arranged her limbs, seemingly trying to decide the best place to touch her with the fire. A shoulder would leave less damage, but a hand would hurt more, and might mean the difference between wakefulness and remaining trapped in the transformation fugue. After a moment the spirit decided on the back of the hand and Nightwing pressed the flame against her skin, holding her hand to keep it in place even as she unconsciously flinched away.

The girl winced then gasped and her body jolted at the heat and pain of the fire. Her eyes briefly opened before rolling back in her head. Her panting quickened with continued contact with the burning stick.

“ _Shawn!_ Shawn, you need to wake up! You're family is waiting for you! Please, you have to wake up!” Nightwing called.

The girl whined and tried to writhe away from the flame pressed against her arm as her breaths turned to moans and her eyes flickered open and shut, struggling into consciousness.

Nightwing nearly dumped her from his lap and he squirmed with excitement. “That's it! Wake up! You have to wake up!”

And Slade could barely believe it, but it seemed to be working, the girl was yanking hard against Nightwing's gasp and her eyes cleared as she cried at the touch of the fire. Finally, Nightwing tossed the stick away and took the girl in his arms, nearly crushing her against his chest in relief.

“What happened?” the girl mumbled into his shoulder, her words slurred around her strange new teeth. Her lips were colored crimson with blood from her tongue catching on the needles behind her lips. “Are you...who are you?”

Nightwing didn't answer her question, he just said with tears dampening his eyes, “You're going to be okay now.”

And Slade wasn't certain that was true, but he didn't have it in him to ruin Nightwing's victory.

 

\- - -

 

Slade shared most of the water he had on him with the girl and she guzzled it up greedily. Afterward, Nightwing stayed in human form long enough to carry the girl to Slade's horse and help situate her at his back for the ride into town. But with his task complete, Nightwing seemed to catch a bout of shyness and disappeared into the form of a robin, winging ahead of Slade toward Blüdhaven and disappearing out of sight.

“Was that...a god?” the girl asked, her dark eyes huge with wonder.

“Something like that,” Slade confessed. “You've got a real idiot on your side.”

The girl didn't speak anymore through the trip as the sun began to sink towards the horizon. Even with the pain of her burn, she was struggling to stay awake and Slade had to elbow her when she started to hang limply against him with delirium.

Back at the village, the younger children not set to work were waiting for his return with avid interest. When they saw his horse on the return road, the kids ran off in all directions to tell the adults the hexenjäger wasn't dead after all, and suddenly it seemed like the entire town had abandoned whatever they'd been doing to spill onto the road and gasp at Slade and the girl, returning alive. He was used to this kind of reaction but it was still a pain everytime.

Slade's horse flicked her ears back in irritation as people crowded her in the street, but she was well trained and even tempered. The animal remained still as the sea of people overtook her and then parted again for the old alderman to pass through with the girl's parents, who she all but fell off the horse into the relieved and crying arms of. Slade wondered how happy they'd really be when they realized she wasn't quite human anymore. Her life might seem a blessing at the moment, but people were cruel. Eventually it might become a curse.

The alderman looked at the girl, who seemed to grow more and more coherent as she interacted with her parents. No doubt the town chief was remembering their agreement to terminate her life if she seemed beyond saving. Slade still didn't feel guilty for having wanted to honor that agreement. Honestly he thought it would have been the better choice even now, for everyone involved. The girl seemed alright at the moment, but she could suddenly drop dead a week from now, or kill herself in a moment of frenzied madness. A quick death might have been kinder, instead of elation now with her return only to have her die later.

But that wasn't Slade's problem.

He dismounted his horse and someone from the alderman's house came to take the mare to the stables, stripping the animal of Slade's pack and gear to put in his rooms. As things quieted down, the parents turned to take the girl somehwere to rest as well.

“Don't let her sleep,” Slade told the parents before they made their exit. He wouldn’t have them blaming her death later on him. “Not for at least a whole day. Stay up with her and keep her awake. If she goes to sleep before that she may never wake up.” Even after the twenty-four hour mark she still might never wake up, but the chances were significantly less and with what she'd been through, keeping her up a whole day was going to be difficult enough. The girl was weak, injured and exhausted.

“Make arrangements,” the alderman told someone before turning back to Slade. “They'll stay in my house until she's well. Is there anything else we should ken?”

“Feed her fish or poultry broths, then solid fish or poultry. Don't give her milk, only broths or water. When she's stronger, you can start giving her breads, fruit and vegetables after a few weeks, but only slowly, one thing at a time. Her body might reject some of it at first. Some of it she may never be able to eat again,” he explained. “Keep an eye on her health, she might seem well on the outside, but internally she's not the same girl she was.” That was to say, completely human. He hoped the alderman understood what Slade was suggesting. He hadn't wanted to outright confirm the girl was no longer normal in case some idiot in the crowd got it into their heads to finish her off. Slade didn't like the idea of anyone undoing his work.

“And the harpy? The nest?” the alderman asked. As if Slade would ever leave a job unfinished.

“Dead. Torched. She won't bother you again,” he confirmed anyway.

The old man nodded. “Good. Stay the night, hexenjäger. Ye look dead on yer feet. We'll feed and house you tonight and settle payment in the morning.”

 

\- - -

 

The next day saw Slade leaving the village before the sun rose. The road out of the town was obscured with mist, but even with the poor visibility he saw the profusion of offerings laid at Nightwing's alter as he left the town.

The girl had remembered the young man that had turned into a bird. Even though Nightwing wasn't known to take the shape of a robin, but rather an owl, the transformation into a bird was enough for them to decide he'd been the deity involved. Slade was happy to lay the girl's survival at his feat and avoided saying anything about the being's involvement other than that Nightwing had been responsible for the girl waking up. Deities—even spirits like Nightwing worshiped as local gods—weren't known for showing their faces often. Everyone wanted to hear a damn story from Slade but he was no one's entertainment. Slade wasn't interested in attention, or the fallout if anything should happen to the girl later. Let them rage and rail at Nightwing if this turned out to be a mistake. It wasn't as if there was much the average human could really do to him, anyway.

“The 'Haveners were really generous.” Slade heard in his ear.

His horse whinnied and danced sideways on the road as a weight settled on it's back and human-shaped arms wrapped themselves around Slade's waist.

Slade calmed his horse and got her back under control and walking on the road before he growled over his shoulder at Nightwing, “Should you really be appearing in broad daylight like that?” He'd been so quick to leave before, after all. This kind of continued harassment was really not what he expected after the mess he'd just left behind. Theirs had never been a relationship that constituted a goodbye.

He felt the being shrug behind him and Slade couldn't help the way his loins stirred at the sight of Nightwing's strong, golden arms encircling him possessively. “It's only you here. So why not?”

Slade snorted. “How about saddle-sores? Have you ever even ridden a horse before?” He suspected not, why would a sylph need to? That pretty ass of his wasn't going to thank him if he stayed back there for long.

“A few times, briefly.” Nightwing answered. “They're nice animals, but there's not much point to one when you can fly.”

“Hn,” was Slade's only response.

“Besides,” Nightwing added, a hint of a pout in his voice. “Other spirits do it, why can't I?”

Slade narrowed his eyes at this seemingly offhand statement. Nightwing was a sociable creature, and Slade had always suspected he must cavort with other spirits and gods and the like but he'd never mentioned anyone other than his druid master to Slade before. “Other spirits? What other spirits.”

He felt Nightwing squirm against his back and it was a bit distracting but not enough to take his mind from the confession. “Just...other spirits,” Nightwing tossed out uselessly.

Slade resisted rolling his eye. “Other spirits. Sure. You're not fooling anyone with that half-assed explanation, kid.”

Nightwing was quiet for a minute, hugging him tightly as they made their way along the road in silence. After a while he felt Nightwing sigh against him and begin, “Tim has a new familiar. Besides myself, that is.”

Slade's mouth pressed into a line. That was...interesting news. Slade wasn't sure yet how to feel about it, whether he really even cared or not. “When did this happen?” he asked.

“About a month ago. Tim cleansed him, like he did me,” Nightwing explained.

So the druid had done the whole sex-magic-cleansing thing with this being too, Slade realized. The kid had bound it under his control so tight he could order the thing around. The boy already had a local god at his beck and call previously, what more could he want? Why bother with some lesser spirit, as he suspected the being must be, because who out there was more powerful than a fallen Talon of the Judge of Souls?

“What kind of spirit is this thing?” Slade asked, curious. If Slade decided to kill the familiar, then this would be important information to know

Nightwing answered readily. “Honored dead. A really powerful draugr, claimed by a god on his death. He's a local deity, too. They call him Red Hood.”

Slade snuffed. “Never heard of him.” Not that it meant much, he never spent long enough in Gotham to hear much folklore. But the news that Nightwing's druid had bound _two_ local deities was astounding. What kind of luck did this boy have? There were sorcerers in palaces that didn't have that kind of power at their disposal. Slade wasn't sure anyone should.

“His cult was defunct for a while, but it's picking up again,” Nightwing said.

“And this other spirit. He just appears to people?” he questioned, since that seemed to be Nightwing's justification for being here now. He'd half thought Nightwing would be angry with him for killing the harpy, no matter how necessary and inevitable it had been. Maybe the kid was finally coming around to his way of thinking? Or maybe he just wanted to pretend it hadn't happened. Slade could do that, too.

“Red Hood does to Tim, sometimes,” he said. And there was that tightness in Nightwing's voice again.

Okay, now Slade was beginning to see where it all connected.

“You're jealous,” he realized. Praising Tim, protecting Tim. That was all that Slade could get the brat to talk about half the time. It was all he'd talked about on the road to Blüdhaven, anyway. On the one hand, Slade couldn’t help but feel some satisfaction regarding anything that got between Nightwing and the druid. But on the other hand he was somewhat insulted on Nightwing's behalf.

Nightwing himself was silent, leaning against Slade's back and for a moment he wished he could see the graykin's uncanny blue eyes, and touch a hand to his face. “I wasn't, at first,” the spirit said with an unusual sadness to his voice. “But Tim is drawn to him, I can tell. And I can't help thinking...it's because Red Hood was born human and I wasn't.”

Slade tightened his hands on the leather of his horse's reigns. He wasn't sure what to say to this admission. He had no idea what was going on in this newly formed triumvirate in Gotham. Maybe Nightwing was right, or maybe he was completely wrong. He seemed to want some kind of comfort, but Slade wasn't sure what he expected or even what the hexenjäger himself was prepared to give the being. Frankly speaking, if Tim dissolved his bond with Nightwing and cast the being away, Slade would have been perfectly content to pick up the pieces. He wasn't happy with their tie to begin with. Not with some brat in Gotham having the power of something like Nightwing at his fingertips, nor with Nightwing being under the influence of someone other than...

Slade shook his head at himself. Useless thoughts. After a moment he asked, “Do you want me to kill this Red Hood?” He kind of wanted to all of a sudden. It wouldn’t get him gold, but he was sure he could find some other way for Nightwing to repay him.

Nightwing laughed, a loud and musical sound, which wasn't quite the reaction Slade expected.

He could hear the smile in Nightwing's voice as he went on. “Kill Red Hood?” the spirit repeated, like he didn't think Slade was perfectly serious about it. “How do you expect to manage that? He almost beat _me_ , you know! You might think otherwise, but you're only human, Slade. Kill the Red Hood, _pff,_ that's adorable...”

Slade found himself grinding his teeth, feeling oddly offended at being labeled a mere 'human'. “Everything has a weakness. He's undead, immune to metal wounds. I could lure him over a bridge and cut the rope. Draugrs can't swim.”

He could almost hear Nightwing's eyes rolling. “They don't breath air, either. He'd just walk out.”

It depended on how strong the current was, but he supposed the sylph had a point. “I could lure him into a crypt and salt the entrance. Then light it on fire.” A classic. It worked on a lot of undead.

“He's empowered by Koriand'r, goddess of Dawn. He's immune to fire. Also, I'm pretty sure he can sense ill intent. He'd never fall for it,” Nightwing revealed.

“Shit.” An undead immune to fire was practically immortal. It was like someone _designed_ this freak to be unkillable. Not to mention Koriand'r was pretty damned vengeful. Slade had yet to get on the radar of any gods that he knew of. He didn't much care what they thought of him, but neither was he in a hurry to piss one off. Especially one known for smiting people. She'd probably take offense to Slade terminating her chosen servant and come after him. He wasn't interested in fighting any gods unless he went into it knowing how to kill them, assuming they _could_ be killed. Some legends suggested it was possible, but it was usually other gods doing the killing so it was hard to say if a human could, no matter how determined.

Nightwing was laughing at him again. “I told you he was powerful,” he said with a healthy dose of amusement at Slade's expense.

Slade glared ahead, considering the dilemma. “How did _you_ beat him then?”

“Suffocated his flames with wind and gave him a bear hug. Then Tim sexed him into submission,” Nightwing answered with what he assumed was a _very_ abbreviated version of events.

Well that wasn't helpful. “I'll find a way,” Slade promised. His reputation was well-earned, after all. He could kill anything. He hadn't met his match yet. Some things were just trickier to murder than others.

He felt Nightwing nuzzle against his shoulder blade and sigh quietly against him. “No, it's fine,” he said. “I actually...kind of like Red Hood. He's good for Gotham, and he'll be helpful to Tim.”

Nightwing's arms suddenly tightened covetously around Slade's waist once more, his fingers clutching at the fabric of his shirt as if Slade might just slip away.

“Just...do one thing for me, Slade?” He heard the spirit say, voice dropping to a whisper that he strained to hear. “Please. Stay mine and only mine?”

The road was quiet for a long time, just the faint rustling of trees, twittering of birds and the _clop-clop_ of his horse ambling along the road. He could hear his own heart beat pounding in his ears like a drum, but he ignored it.

Slade clenched his jaw. “I don't belong to you, Nightwing,” he reminded the being harshly.

The spirit went rigid against his back. “I...I know,” he answered, disappointment in his voice.

“I'm not one of your worshipers,” Slade went on. “I'm not the druid that holds your leash. You don't get to ask anything of me.”

Nightwing's hands tightened once again and then shakily eased open, his arms moving to the tops of Slade's thighs and then away from him completely until they weren't touching at all, not even along his back. “I know. I'm sorry. I don't know what I was thinking,” Nightwing said, tone carefully blank but he could hear the hurt underneath, barely repressed.

And Slade couldn’t stand it. He hated that betrayed sound in his voice, hated the feeling it gave him. Hated how weak it made him. Almost hated it enough to hate Nightwing too, but he could never do that. No, never that.

Slade sighed, biting at his lip. He shook his head, not sure if it was directed at Nightwing or himself. Probably himself. “You know...you know the only ass I'm interested in is yours, right?” he confessed to the air in front of him and the quiet forest.

For a moment he thought he was just talking to himself, he didn't feel anyone against him, hear anyone's breath but his own. But in the silence he heard Nightwing whisper hopefully, “Is that so?”

“It is,” he said and it was true. Nightwing was the only thing—only _person—_ he'd ever wanted, body and soul. Maybe the only one he ever really would.

Slade felt feather-light lips against his cheek and heard the words, “Then it's enough,” spoken against his ear.

And then the wind picked up enough that it nearly pushed him off his horse, and the animal whinnied as she shied away at the mysterious breeze and nearly dumped Slade into the bushes along the roadside before he got her calmed and back on track.

When Slade finally turned on his horse to look behind him, there was no one.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Hey all, sorry for the wait to everyone who's been waiting for a sequel to Blood-Stained. I've got more sequels planned with Tim and Jason in them, but until I get those up, I hope you enjoyed this little overture with Dick and Slade. If you want to bug me about fics or see what I'm up to, you can head to my tumblr: https://m00nslippers.tumblr.com/
> 
> I hope you all enjoyed this story, thank you so much for reading!


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